EEG Artifact Removal System for Depression Using a Hybrid Denoising Approach

Introduction: A number of computer- aided diagnosis systems for depression are being offered to be used by the clinicians as a method to authorize the diagnosis. EEG may be used as an objective analysis tool for identification of depression in the initial stage so as to avoid it from reaching a severe and permanent state. However, artifact contamination reduces the accuracy in EEG signal processing systems. Methods: This work proposes a novel denoising method based on EMD (Empirical Mode Decomposition) with detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) and wavelet packet transform. As the first stage, real EEG recordings corresponding to depression patients are decomposed into various mode functions by applying EMD. Then, DFA is used as the mode selection criteria. Further wavelet packets decomposition (WPD) based evaluation is used to extract the cleaner signal. Results: Simulations have been carried out on real EEG databases for depression to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. To conclude the efficacy of the proposed technique, SNR and MAE have been identified. The results show improved signal to noise ratio and lower values of MAE for the combined EMD-DFA-WPD technique. Also, Random Forest and SVM (Support Vector Machine) based classification shows improved accuracy of 98.51% and 98.10% for the proposed denoising technique. Whereas the accuracy of the EMD- DFA is 98.01% and 95.81% and EMD combined with DWT technique is 98.0% and 97.21% for the EMD- DFA technique for RF and SVM respectively as compared to the proposed method. Also, the classification performance for both the classifiers has been compared with and without denoising to highlight the effectiveness of the proposed technique. Conclusion: Proposed denoising system results in better classification of depressed and healthy individuals resulting in better diagnosing system. These results can be further analyzed using other approaches as a solution to the mode mixing problem of EMD approach.